The Music of Chance

4.5
Супер написана. Чете се все едно шофираш с удоволствие.

ПП. След като я прочетете не бързайте да си мислите, че сте я прочели. Изчакайте малко и си върнете някои сцени.

Цялата книга е едно пътуване, чрез което Джим търси изкупление, спасение..., себе си ... Загубен и прецакан от случайността на съдбата след като получава огромна сума пари, но твърде късно, за да може това да повлияе на някои събития. Решава да отиде докрай, да заложи всичко и играта започва ...

След като я прочетох в първия момент си казах "Ъ" или пък беше "Хм" ... , помислих си, че това наистина е краят. Миг по-късно ми се откри следната картина:

- двамата мултимилионера, чиито милиони са ги довели до там, че могат да изпитат удоволствие само в изварщението, че могат всичко да купят, могат да местят замъци, могат да създадат умалено копие - макет на свой собствен град (Световният град), в който всичко се контролира и който всъщност е изключително копие на реалността. Включително могат да си позволят да уловят истински хора и да ги ситуират в този макет, да се забавляват с тях, да ги поставят в положение на опитни мишки.

- Джим е пределно наясно, че от подобно извращение няма да има изход. След случая с Джак със сигурност всички съмнения са изчезнали. Попаднал е в път без изход.

- Колата се превърна в светилище от неуязвимост, убежище, в което нищо не можеше да го накърни, нито да го засегне. ... Наш беше видял няколко смъртни случая по време на обиколките си, а на два-три пъти се беше отървал на косъм от сблъсък. Но всъщност приветстваше тези напомняния, защото те внасяха елемент на риск в това, което вършеше, а той именно това търсеше: да почувства, че държи юздите на собствения си живот.

- A Saab will surrender its own life to save yours. - рекламен слоган на Saab от 1990г.
http://blog.thesaabsite.com/wp-conten...

- В кръчмата "При Оли" Наш си издейства той да шофира ...

The Music of Chance

Two lives that, from a certain point on, are basically driven by chance. An absurd and, in this case, rather grim notion for the people involved. A typical Auster novel, I'd say, and highly recommended.

The question I asked myself on my second read is how much of my own life was determined by coincidences. Not too much, I think. What I find remarkable, though, is that from this year on, with the pandemic, our collective lives have become somewhat dependent on coincidences. Who would have imagined at the start of the year how the rest would develop; if and how we return to “normality”, whatever that means.

The chance encounters and coincidences in this book are, of course, directed by the author, who is pulling the strings. Makes me wonder who's pulling ours.


n  n
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Let's begin with a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke: "If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; instead blame yourself for failing to call forth its riches." Paul Auster's The Music of Chance seems a novel steeped in defeatism. Or, perhaps the sometimes random nature of life might be considered the theme of Auster's tale.



Jim Nashe, a divorced Boston fireman, down on his luck, receives a small inheritance from a father he'd not heard from in ages, quits his job at the firehouse to travel rather aimlessly around the U.S. in search of some form of redefinition, or until the money runs out. En route, he briefly renews a relationship with a former girlfriend in San Francisco, until she drops him.

Nashe almost began to welcome pain, to feel ennobled by it. He felt like a man who had finally had the courage to put a bullet through his head--but in this case it was not death, it was life, it was the explosion that triggers the birth of new worlds. He just walked out, climbed into his car & was gone.

As long as he was driving, he carried no burdens, was unencumbered by even the slightest particle of his former life. Memories no longer seemed to bring the old anguish. Perhaps the endless tapes of Bach, Mozart & Verdi that he listened to while sitting behind the wheel had something to do with that, as if the sounds were somehow emanating from him, drenching the landscape, turning the visible world into a reflection of his own thoughts, the music carrying him into a realm of weightlessness.

Rather quixotically, he picks up a hitchhiker, a would-be, high-stakes gambler named Jack Pozzi, who had just been beaten up in the midst of a poker game. They throw in their lot together & go in pursuit of two oddly paired men, Flower & Stone, who have recently gained a fortune by winning a lottery sweepstakes via a ticket they shared. Word has it that the lottery winners like to gamble & seem ready to be fleeced.


There is more at play here than two aimless drifters in search of a quick buck but in my opinion, not much more, as they bet & lose what remains of Jim Nashe's inheritance + Jim's new Saab & even some money they did not have.

In order to resolve the debt, they are forced to build a meaningless wall on the extensive property the two lottery-winners have bought, using stones from an old British castle that had fallen into ruins, which were transported to the estate of the suddenly wealthy pair on a whim after their trip to England.

Something might have been made of what seems like a Sisyphean struggle with stones, watched over by a caretaker-watchman named Murks, who carries a gun to enforce their indemnity.

However, even when the initial debt is paid, they end up further in arrears, being assessed for food, tools, lodging in a small shed-like mobile home & even the cost of a hooker for Jack Pozzi. They seem to persevere, though when Pozzi attempts an escape, he is severely beaten. Ultimately, there appears no end to their wall construction work & little promise of eventual freedom.



Jim Nashe has a daughter in Minnesota + a sister & family who care for him, causing me to feel troubled by the ending assigned to The Music of Chance, which I won't reveal.

While I've heard good things about the quality of Auster's work, the structure of this novel seemed to cave in on itself, much like a poorly-built wall. Something more memorable, perhaps even mythical or allegorical might have been made of this by celebrated author Paul Auster, but the novel's descriptive nature seems overwhelmed by a dreary lack of resolution and a nihilistic, rather arbitrary ending.

And, while I am not entirely dependent on the book's title, there is a form of music called Aleatoric, (from the Latin word for dice), or "chance music", where some element of the composition is left to chance &/or to the determination of the performers, to some degree employed fairly recently by John Cage & Karlheinz Stockhausen. Perhaps, I longed for a plot resembling this form of music.

*Within my review are 2 photo images of the late author Paul Auster, who died on April 30th, 2024, the 2nd image with former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres & author Salman Rushdie.

So you're driving your car, a Saab as it turns out. You've already driven it eighty-thousand miles or so crisscrossing the country, which is what recently un-moored male characters do in U.S. fiction. Except it isn't your car anymore. You've lost it bankrolling another drifter in a card game. You've been forced - indentured, really - to build a wall to pay off the rest of the debt.

But you're finally free, or you will be tomorrow, and two men who have monitored your exertions have taken you out to celebrate and are now letting you drive the Saab, what once was yours, home from a bar.

You turn the radio to a classical station and you hear something familiar, an andante from some eighteenth century string quartet. Can't quite place the composer though. Probably Mozart or Haydn. Hell, maybe it was one of the quartets Mozart dedicated to Haydn. Or maybe it was the other way around.

At a certain point, the music of both men seemed to touch, and it was no longer possible to tell them apart. And yet, Haydn had lived to a ripe old age, honored with commissions and court appointments and every advantage the world of that time could offer. And Mozart had died young and poor, and his body had been thrown into a common grave.

Such is the random nature of things, the music of chance.

You have sped up, dangerously so, and the men with you, men you hate, yell at you to slow down. The older man next to you reaches over and turns off the music. As if some other can turn off your music. He'll look up to see the headlights.

----- ----- ----- ----- -----

In 1999, David Mitchell wrote  Ghostwritten and included a character who was in a musical collective called The Music of Chance, named "after a novel by that New York bloke."

This is the novel by that New York bloke.

A macabre fable about fate and chance and randomness and destiny.Plenty of philosophical reference and dilemmas sprinkled throughout the tale.Throw in some Greek mythology also.Lots of the classical Auster themes and characterisations are here.Enjoyed the reference to Rousseaus target practice in a forest,I can relate to that.
Not for everybody but I really enjoyed it.
Discovered afterwards that it was made into a movie.Apart from his most recent novel I think I have now completed the entire Auster canon.One of the best living American writers in my view.

Opening lines:
'By the time Nashe understood what was happening to him, he was past the point of wanting it
to end . . .'

What is a human fate? Is it a preset pattern decided by some divine providence from above? Or is it just a hellish roulette?
“It was one of those random, accidental encounters that seem to materialize out of thin air – a twig that breaks off in the wind and suddenly lands at your feet. Had it occurred at any other moment, it is doubtful that Nashe would have opened his mouth. But because he had already given up, because he figured there was nothing to lose anymore, he saw the stranger as a reprieve, as a last chance to do something for himself before it was too late.”
A chance… There is always a chance. And the wheel of fortune keep turning…
“His money was gone, his car was gone, his life was in a shambles. If nothing else, perhaps those fifty days would give him a chance to take stock, to sit still for the first time in over a year and ponder his next move. It was almost a relief to have the decision taken out of his hands, to know that he had finally stopped running.”
The gamblers had put on their lucky card too much and lost. Desolation, hopelessness and the infernal toil – those were their award and they literally found themselves in one of the circles of hell with only a chance of redemption…
We gamble with chance and chance plays with our fates.

By far the best book I have read of Auster. The characters are brought deeper and deeper into a prison made up of their own careless acts of chance.
The ending reminded me of Kafka's "The Trial" - just as one sees light at the end of the tunnel, a random event changes everything - just like the game of poker in the begining